Complete, Smoothed Life Tables and Life Expectancy in the Appalachian Population and Subpopulation by Region and Socioeconomic Status

• Activity Number: 550
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Bin Huang*+ and Bernard Rachet and Claudia Allemani and Jing Guo and Hannah Weir and Michel Coleman and Thomas Tucker
• Companies: University of Kentucky and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Kentucky and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Kentucky
• Keywords: Relative survival ; Flexible Poisson Regression ; Life table ; Appalachia

Abstract

The burden of cancer is higher for residents of Appalachia than for the United States as a whole. A CDC-funded project is attempting to examine relative survival in the Appalachian region and its sub-regions. The first part of the project is to develop complete, smoothed, life tables by region and socio-economic status. The inter-censal county-level populations and mortality data were acquired from the US National Center for Health Statistics for each of the calendar years 2000-2010. Flexible Poisson regression models using splines were applied to smooth the raw mortality rates. Simulations were conducted to identify the best models by varying combinations of numbers and locations of knots. The complete, smoothed life tables will be based on a set of variables including state, race, Appalachian region, sub-region and socioeconomic status. The specific life tables generated in this study are essential for estimating population-based cancer survival within the relative survival framework in Appalachia and in the individual states of the Appalachian region.